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Apple to NBC: Go Fuck Yourselves, You Greedy Morons

via Daring Fireball

You may have already seen it. But I just wanted to express, in a few words, just how sad this makes me.

This girl is cattle. She is good for only one thing. Her parents, and the parents of all such individuals, are just as much criminals as Michael Vick. Unless she is certified retarded, or has deep learning disabilities, there is no excuse.

They’re everywhere. And it saddens me greatly. The word “vacuous” should never have become such an accurate descriptor for such a large part of any one society.

It lasted about a second. I felt the floor shake a little, and heard a rumble too. It could easily have been just a heavy-ass truck going across the bridge. But, according to the guy on the phone, he felt it there in Berkeley too. Annie says we generally don’t feel them in this building, so it must have been a semi-strong one. I just looked it up:
http://quake.wr.usgs.gov/recenteqs/Quakes/nc40200915.htm

Looks like it was a 3.0 ….and if you’d like to keep track…
http://quake.usgs.gov/recenteqs/Maps/San_Francisco.htm

Go there in your mind: there’s a lab rat who’s been taught to push on the bar to get the cheese. You get it nice and conditioned, and then you stop giving it the cheese when it asks. Fuckin’ rat just sits there pressing on the bar all day because it doesn’t know how to do anything else.

There’s a lady sitting kitty-corner from me on the plane right now, been wearing the airline-supplied headphones since she sat down, intently watching the trailers for some stupid Waitress movie they’ll be charging $8 to watch. All you gotta do is swipe your credit card with the mag-stripe facing the right of the aircraft (they pointed out this important detail no less than three times during the pre-takeoff announcements). This lady’s been sitting there swiping her card for like ten minutes, to no avail. Ten minutes. She’s tried each of the 10+ cards she’s got in that wallet of hers. If I were the guy in the seat in front of her, I’d turn around and slap her across the mouth for all the clicking that’s surely reverberating through his head.

I found myself wondering, today…. With all those research studies about fat people begetting fat people, and other such stupid shit you’d see on MSNBC, here’s a study I want to see:

I want scientists and research analysts to tell me, with facts, control groups and standard deviations from the mean…how much more likely it is that children will grow up to be complete fucking imbiciles and burdens on society if their parents allowed them to apply entire sheets of stickers to the inside of the rear windows of the family car.

I saw an article or a wikipedia entry last week (and I wish I could find it now) that described the act of adapting certain words to create descriptors for other, similar ideas. Like, calling someone a chocoholic, even though “ohol” is part of “alcohol,” which has nothing to do with the situation you’re describing. It’s this fucked-up, twisted etymology that’s bothering me this morning.

A week ago (trust me, this is related, ) Apple held a “special event,” at which they introduced their new iMac and a bunch of other things. Afterward, they held a brief Q&A session, during which, someone asked a very stupid question. He asked “why don’t you put ‘Intel Inside’ stickers on your computers?”

Now, I won’t get into why that’s such a stupid question. It just is. But tech-bloggers went nuts. In the blogosphere….a word whose etymology allllmost makes enough sense to ignore. Anyway, bloggers quickly tagged the sticker question as “Stickergate.”

Yes, that’s right. Somehow this guy’s question relates to a luxury hotel in D.C., and of course, since the only reason any of us know about said hotel is because of President Nixon’s break-in/bugging/etc scandal, it therefore stands to reason that “Stickergate” must really be some impeachable offense committed by none other than the President of the United States. Oh, how I wish this were true.

But the fact is, of course, people just twist the language to imply scandal, be sensationalist, grab readers, and generally desensitize everyone who’s watching. The sky is falling. Wolf.

And when it comes to real scandal, nothing gets done.

It’s an interesting thing to suddenly realize one day that a name on a sign in your neighborhood…is a name you saw when you were living in another world entirely.

When I lived in Baltimore, I worked at a well-known VW/Audi tuner shop. This tuner shop sold go-fast software from APR (Audi Performance and Racing). APR is really well-known in VW/Audi circles. Huge. And their website is www.goapr.com. Now, just out of curiosity one day, I hopped on www.apr.com, just to see who had beat them to the punch for the domain name. It was Alain Pinel Realtors, and their website sucked…I figured they were just some rinky-dink operation that got the domain first. I thought it was funny at the time, and just kinda forgot about it.

Now I live in Silicon Valley. Several miles away from me, there is a small office building in a quiet little town, with a sign out front that says “Alain Pinel Realtors.” The office is in Woodside, the town that holds Steve Jobs’ house (and many other multi-multi-millionaires). Alain Pinel is a huge name on the peninsula, as they deal with the majority of the many-million-dollar homes, ranches, complexes, mansions, whatever the fuck you want to call them. Anyhow, I just think it’s funny to come across something like this, a name I would never have expected to see again.

Today, I’m working on a project, a website for a company that builds custom homes on the peninsula. The CEO’s name is Dick Breaux. I swear I’ve seen that name before, and I doubt it’s a common name. But when you hear of a man named “dick bro,” you kinda remember it. If only I could remember where I’d heard it before, I could make another fun connection.

But since I can’t, I’m reminded of another name that’s funny like Dick Breaux is. When I was working at the tuner shop, we got an order from a guy named Tom Gay. I could have ignored it, or gotten off with a simple chuckle…but his email address was through Cox Communications.

That’s right, gay at cox dot net. Poor guy.

I took the dog out a moment ago, and as she was doing her business, I was kinda just kicking through the dead leaves and dirt on the ground. Among the leaves, I saw an old fragment of rope, tied in a knot around a chunk of tree branch that was so dry, it turned to dust when my foot touched it. Out of instinct, I looked up. There, on a stub of branch that had broken many, many years ago, is another knot of the same rope, dangling down a foot or so before its frayed end.

Most of the children who once swung on this rope have gone on to have children of their own, lived full lives, and I’d bet some have even died by now.

I once went to a therapist who had this trademark gesture, where he’d tap the end of his nose twice (while crossing his eyes to follow his finger), which was his indication for bringing a wandering mind back to the task at hand, snapping out of a daydream, abandoning the tangent, etc.

I took the lesson to heart, I understand it’s imperative that I maintain focus, and I desire to do so, more than anything else in the world. You’d think sooner or later my attempts to discipline myself would coalesce into a fucking modus operandi that could even be mistaken for “disciplined”.

And somehow I still have a problem with it. At my job, I’m not as productive as I could be. In my relationship, I’m consistently letting her down. In my family, I’m seldom in touch as much as I should be. And on and on.

I was once sharp. It’s been a long time since I’ve felt (or been) sharp. Consequently, I feel dull.

Suggestions, recommendations, comments welcome.